To Sanctify This Altar
by Dark Manifest
Summary: How it began, and how it was finished. Sparda, and the priestess, during the sealing of Temen-ni-gru.


**To Sanctify This Altar**

**All disclaimers apply.**

_**Note:** Prequel to "The Cauldron of Morning", another Sparda x Priestess I wrote, posted elsewhere, soon to migrate here. Just one scenario I'm trying out, and somewhat inconsistant since it's working from tidbits alone. I might do another completely different from this later on. Enjoy._

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The sky was black, and there was a hole in the world where the moon should be.

Darkness spilled from this tear in an inexorable wave, bringing with it shapeless things, and things that had shapes that could not be defined. They screamed. They howled. They lusted.

Bolts of white lightning streaked across the matte like fingers trying to rip away each layer, touching the ground in some places, brightening a world heavy with the musk of battle and death. The tower had already been struck twelve times. He guessed it would only take one more.

The knight landed hard, talons scraping stone. He shucked rainwater from his wings with one sharp motion, but it would take more than that to remove the gore on his claws or his sword. That, however, wasn't his concern.

The crimson amulet hovering over the center of the template was.

A woman paced around the receptacle, one hand over her side. Streams of red dripped through her fingers, and even in this storm, he could taste the particular flavor of it from here.

"What are you doing?" he demanded, stepping closer. Her eyes darted to him with wariness. One couldn't blame her, he could imagine the sight he made, blood-drenched, steam rising from his armored skin into the cold air from exertion, as fully changed as this mortal atmosphere would allow him to be. But infernal power was seeping through the cracks made by this tower as smoke though a vent, the fires of Hell seeking to devour new fuel, and it fed his strength to some degree.

"It isn't enough," she said when she had recovered from her apprehension. She shook her head, looking back at the center of the carved circle. "The ritual is incomplete somehow. The amulet..."

"I knew it would not suffice," the knight said evenly. "For a spell of this magnitude, it would take a score of souls. Even the key wouldn't begin to - "

"We are not at the point yet."

"We are well past it!" His voice came out in a roar that he could not contain, shaking the structure around them. The woman did not flinch, but her dark eyes narrowed, her lashes weighted with drops of water, from tears or rain he did not know.

The knight pulled harder on the reins that kept his true nature under his control. This soon after war, it was difficult. The scent of blood wafted over to him from her still-raw wound, and he felt his fangs lengthen. Soon, he would have to feed again in order to maintain this form. Control, control.

"The Dark Lord is in his vault," he said, flat-toned this time, "his army is in tatters, but I am not inexhaustible. More will come through this tower, legions spanning as far the horizon. The scales of power are shifting, and until someone takes rule of them again, your world is free game."

She heaved a sharp, exasperated sigh. "I _know_ that. But what is the point if we have to spill more innocent human blood just to accomplish this thing? We would need dozens!"

"To start, yes."

"No."

He almost snarled. "Don't be a fool."

"The ends do _not_ justify the means," she said savagely. "I don't expect you to understand."

"I understand war, and what it takes to win."

More lightning, illuminating her pale face, highlighting the movement of many wings overhead. Both insectile and animalian, he could tell, it wouldn't be long before the tower was swarming with beasts that hadn't seen light since his own birth a millennium ago. His blade weighed heavy in his hand, thirsty for more battle, the bone gleaming with what fluids remained of the last fight. There was mortal blood in the mix as well, witches and sorcerers who had stood in his path. The dark knight had not hesitated then.

The woman's eyes fell to the sword, too clear in the momentary flash of brightness. Somehow, she knew, in that inexplicable way she seemed to know things. She knew he would never hesitate.

"And at what cost?" Her voice was so soft he could barely hear it above the thunder, but edged as sharply as a sword itself. "The very lives we're fighting to protect?"

"What price a human life? Is that it?" The knight rounded on her. He savored the way she followed his every move, as cautious of him as she would be of any of the twisted things that lurked in the bowels of his home, awaiting the chance to invade this world. "If you believe all your kind are worth these few..."

"It's a matter of numbers to you?" Shaking her head, disbelieving, her contempt so thick he could almost bite through it. "Monster."

It wasn't the first time he had heard that word - not even the only language he had heard it in - but coming from her lips, it was laughable. Panic reduced all humans, it seemed, to petty emotions, to desperation and irrational ends. More fool he, for thinking one could be the exception.

"Call me what you will, but you know nothing of true savagery," he growled. Ice layered his words. "Let Temen-ni-gru stand an hour more and you will see monsters. You will see nightmares." The likes of which could only be dreamed by her kind - for him, they were very real, they were the foundation of all he had been taught.

She turned away, drenched hair falling over the strong curve of her neck - he couldn't help but note the vein that throbbed there, he could hear her heartbeat, so much faster than his own core pulse - and before she could speak again, or he could, his arm and his sword was moving, almost of its own will, slicing through the air so cleanly it could cleave shadows. And cleave a shadow it did, through the center of the cat-shaped beast's core. It screamed, murdered in mid-leap for the knight's throat.

More demons that had slipped past the guardians he had defeated and appointed, few, but all higher level, soldier class. Shadows, Frosts, Blood Goats, Abysses. The sword drank greedily of them, their blood and their souls. He almost warned the woman to stay out of the way, stopping himself just in time, because she hardly required protection. Power flooded from her hand as bright as any bolt, purifying, leaving mere scorch marks where devils once stood.

When the last of the attackers had fallen, the knight wiped water from his chin. His eyes burned, purple mist in each breath he didn't need to draw. "We've no time left for this," he said in subterranean tones.

The portal continued to give birth to abominations overhead, and the cries of the hungry were joined by the screams of the hunted.

The woman closed her fist over the searing energy in her palm. "I know," she panted, hand white-knuckled over her wound. It was the second time she was saying it, but there was no defiance left in her now. She walked over to the center of the circle. "My world ends even as we speak."

A gesture from her and the amulet that had been placed over the conduit rose higher into the air. Above her free hand, it turned, glittering.

"Your gift to us," she murmured, "the symbol of your allegiance."

His claws tightened around the thighbone hilt of the sword. "Your point?"

"I always wondered what your reasons were. Your ultimate goal. If not power, if not the empty throne that waits where the Dark Lord once sat, then what?"

"It didn't matter when you took that talisman, it should not now."

"I know my reasons. I would do everything I could to protect my daughters, my people - everything within my power."

"Everything except the necessary sacrifice?"

She looked up on that final word. In the darkness split only by flashes, her eyes seemed bottomless, and something he could not name roiled within. Most mortals were incomprehensible - the stupid often were - but this one leagues worse. She was the only one who could make him still with only a look, when creatures ten times her age and a hundred times more fearsome could not even do that much with all their might.

What in this world or the next could make her look at him like that?

"No," she said. "Sometimes one has to make sacrifices. That's true for all of us - human and demon alike. I know what I'm willing to give. And you? Would you give that throne? Your life?"

"If I am bested in fair battle, there is no honor lost in that."

"But for what? Isn't that what you asked me? Why I do this, why any of us even bother? For honor alone, Gladiator of the Void? No, I think your life is worth more than that."

Hearing the closest human translation of his true name from her would have made him flinch, if he was the sort who flinched. "You are incapable of judging the worth of my life."

"And yet you think yourself capable of judging the worth of human life. A hundred for a thousand, a handful for a score. One for the many. Just another lamb on the altar to please gods who have forsaken us. Is that worth to you?"

"You ask me questions to which even I don't have the answer. It is why I came here, to - "

To what? To find answers? In this human wasteland of decadent palaces and pretentious monuments, to know why? Had he come all this way for that?

Blood so thick not even a flood could wash it away, bodies that could be piled high enough to surpass the greatest tower, and for _what_?

If he could have lied, he would have.

"I don't know," he admitted at last.

She glanced at him, surprise etching her features. And then she smiled, faintly. "That is a very human thing."

He wasn't sure whether that was a compliment or an insult anymore. Perhaps that was the beginning of the descent.

Her gaze went back to the sky, now seething blacker than ever with violence and sorrow. "Sacrifice. I'm tired of sacrifices," she said, and she wasn't talking to him.

The edge of the sword he had forged in his own twin's soul glittered. It was his turn to say, "I know." But he wasn't speaking to her, either.

"So let's make this one the last." She let the amulet fall into the receptacle. A surge of power rippled through the foundation of the seal, quivering beneath their feet.

The knight knew what she was suggesting. "It could end us both," he said without intonation. "Fail, and we destroy it all. Succeed, and be drawn into Hell. Even still more consequences that we cannot imagine."

"Perhaps." She inclined her head as if it had only just occurred to her. "But I believe it is worth it."

"You would give yourself." It wasn't a question. "For what? This world? Some ideal of the people in it?" Countless that were of no value whatsoever, and the single one worth all of them was going to risk to her very soul to save them.

If it took him a thousand years, he would never comprehend it.

Nor why he would gladly follow her into the flames himself.

She only appraised him with her spirit that did not belong in a body so frail. "If I have to explain it," she said to him, raising her dagger, "then you wouldn't understand anyway."

In one quick motion, she drew the blade across her wrist, deep, but not deep enough to part the tendons. Her life spilled from the slash, splashing onto the carved circle. It seemed to absorb into the very stone itself.

There was a hole in the world, and now he had the chance to mend it. And all it would take was a sacrifice.

One more on the broken altar to deaf gods, for all the sacrifices that had come before now.

"So, knight." The priestess held her hand out to him as their eyes met, mortal to devil, believer to one who wanted to believe. Drops of her blood fell into the conduit, anointing the key to both worlds. "What say you?"

* * *

As the sun rose, as Sophia's body cooled in his arms, and her people came to collect her, the devil knight who would be called Sparda looked into the distance, still holding her unmoving hand with his own human fingers, stained red.

_- end_


End file.
